Aaron Tracy is the creator and host of The Secret World of Roald Dahl. He also writes TV and audio dramas, and his first audio novel, The Honeymoon Period, releases next year. He runs the audio company Parallax, and is on faculty at Yale.
I teach a course on Narrative Podcasts at Yale, and one of the quiet pleasures of the job is figuring out which shows to assign each week. There are only a few requirements. The shows have to have the potential to spark real discussion, and they can’t feel like homework. Otherwise, all narrative shows are on the table. Basically, anything besides a chat show. Every series on this list is something I’ve taught in my class.
I decided to focus on biographies today because that’s where my own taste keeps leading me. There’s something about immersing yourself in a single person’s life that I find much more rewarding than any other podcast genre. You get to borrow into someone else’s perspective for a while and come out on the other side a little different. For me, the best ‘biopods’ (did I coin this term? Please send royalties if you use it at the dinner table) are even more immersive than the best biographical books or biopics. Thanks to rich soundscapes and the subject’s own voice, they give you that particular pleasure of complete surrender to a story. You start to think like someone else, see the world through their eyes. The best of these shows make the subject’s choices feel inevitable in retrospect, and still surprising at every turn.
All the shows on this list are formally inventive, emotionally surprising, and occasionally willing to interrogate what biography is even allowed to do. Reach out and let me know what I missed! aaron@listentoparallax.com
Dolly Parton’s America
Jad Abumrad is like the David Chase of podcasts. Or maybe the Steven Spielberg. Or Stanley Kubrick? What I’m trying to say is, he’s better at it than everybody else. I have zero relationship with Dolly Parton, so I wouldn’t have thought this show would hold any interest for me. But Jad brilliantly uses Dolly’s story as a kind of tuning fork for the whole country. Every frequency of every American contradiction is planted here. It widens your world view while also being a total joy to listen to.
The Secret World of Roald Dahl
How’d this one get on here? Apologies for promoting my own show, but… Dahl lived one of the noisiest lives of his century. His life had more distinct chapters than almost anyone I’ve ever written about: fighter pilot, espionage agent, struggling screenwriter, self-taught neuroscientist. The children’s books that he’s so famous for? They didn’t come until his mid 40s. At its heart, the show is about his relentless, unending search for identity.
The Ballad of Billy Balls
The widow at the center of this story has one of the all-time great podcast voices, right up there with John McLemore from S-Town. Technically, this is a true crime show. But it’s also an amazing biographical time capsule, perfectly conjuring the gritty east village of 1980s New York. Then it completely pulls the rug out from under you at the end of Episode 2 with a reveal that reframes the whole series in one perfect gut punch. My students love it.
Lives Less Ordinary
Start with the Bike-Riding Bank Robber episode. An Olympic cycling hopeful lets the movie Heat convince him that robbing banks is a reasonable career pivot, and keeps at it until the FBI disagrees.
The Jewish Lives Podcast
The most formal one on my list. A three-piece suit, compared to the corduroy jacket of Dolly Parton’s America. It takes the biographical format seriously in a way most pods don’t. Each subject gets a genuine scholar who’s spent years with the material. These episodes scratch that academic itch. Short and authoritative. The series has a quiet confidence that comes from pairing serious historians with subjects they genuinely care about. And we get to hear about everyone from Sondheim to Trotsky to Brandeis to Mel Brooks.
You Must Remember This
Probably my favorite podcast ever. Each season is a really in-depth, wise film analysis with brilliant insights. But every episode also doubles as a biography of a filmmaker or storyteller. I could pick from dozens of episodes, especially when Karina gives the full-season treatment to figures like Polly Platt or even Charles Manson. I’ll sort of cheat here and go with the season on the Erotic ’80s. It’s basically a biography of Hollywood in that decade. A year by year excavation of movies that were dismissed as trashy at the time, delivered in Karina’s deadpan, hypnotic voice, with enough historical context to convince you we should take them more seriously.
Heavyweight: “Leif”
I imagine this series is already on most peoples’ lists? I’ll specify my recommendation with “Leif,” an episode that sort of turns the show’s formula on its head. The investigator isn’t Jonathan Goldstein, it’s Kalila Holt, one of the show’s producers, trying to find out why a boy named Leif never asked her out on Valentine’s Day in junior high. The smallness of the wound is the whole point. As she tells her emotional life story, it’s surprising and vulnerable and a real pleasure.
The Dropout
To me, the test of any good true-crime podcast is whether it still holds any pleasure once you know the ending. Rebecca Jarvis built this show like a thriller with great cliffhangers that actually becomes better with every listen. It doubles as a fascinating biography of a self-made billionaire with a fake Steve Jobs voice and wardrobe, who accidentally exposed a whole culture of Silicon Valley groupthink.
Dead Eyes: Season One
One of the great conceits for a podcast ever. A struggling actor is haunted by the fact that Tom Hanks fired him from a tiny role in Band of Brothers twenty years earlier for supposedly having dead eyes. He believes it changed the trajectory of his life, and he’s determined to get to the bottom of it. Every detail is brilliant. Connor Ratliff is a sympathetic host, and you really feel for him. Mostly because he takes a super specific incident from his life and makes it so universal that everyone can relate. This one is more autobiography than biography, but I’m going to count it. Also, shows like this rarely stick the landing. There was only one way for the season to end without being a giant disappointment, and that’s for Connor to awkwardly confront one of the biggest movie stars who’s ever lived. He does. And it’s glorious.
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